Scattered postings from a hitchhiker's travel journal

The journey; on the road to the digital networked society

Estate agents: new medium, old tricks

Estate agents get a lot of bad press. Having had a least a few friends who’ve dabbled in helping people buy or sell property, I want to think the generalisations are unjust, yet every time I get to that point, something knocks me back. And today, speeding around in Laijla’s sporty BMW, looking at places in West London, I get another one of those knock-backs. Here’s why…

To save embarrassment, and probably sure law suits, we’ll call Laijla’s agency ‘A’ and her rivals ‘B’. I’ve never bought from either, but always liked agency A. Recently in their brochure they were gutsy enough to describe one mews house as having ‘its wiring shot to pieces, an interesting collection of mushrooms in the interior, and in need of a complete make-over.” You have to agree, it’s a tad more honest than the standard lines of ‘scope to redesign, unique property, great potential’ that you’d expect.

But when I tell agent A that agent B said they ‘work together’, it did unlock a minor explosion in an otherwise flawless behaviour. “Well, if having my manager phone them up and ask them to stop stealing our properties and posting them on their own websites is working together, then yes, you could say that!”

“Seriously?” [By the way, I’m really not making this up]

“It all began when we started getting a lot of calls from them to check availability on some of our places; a lot of calls. I was thinking ‘wow, that’s really impressive’ as agents don’t often do that. Remember that many agents will market properties they don’t have a direct relationship with the landlord over, but it’s controlled. We agree who will represent what and how commissions will be split. But then we went to their website and saw they were just copying our entire database. Everything was there.”

Conclusion? The scraping of websites isn’t confined to the spammers, email harvesters, and other bottom-dwellers native to the digital food chain. Firms with low morals and no ethics from the traditional economy can extend their approaches to the digital networked economy, making the web, well, just like everywhere else. But maybe, the very transparency that helped Laijla’s team see what they were up to could help expose them for what they are.

Milestones

Broadband battle with US UK penetration of fast broadband connections slips ahead of US for first time.

Silver surfers swell Almost two out of every three of those coming up to retirement in the UK are online; double where the UK was in just 2001

9% of China online And with vast growth rates to match it's not hard to understand why every dot com is looking East right now.

Blogtastic 1 new blog created every second as blogging goes mainstream.

The magic billion Crossing the threshold of '1 billion people' now online worldwide.

Beethoven rocks the house 1.3m downloads of Beethoven tracks, making him 1-9 in the download chart. Thanks to BBC Online the stereotype of music being just for kids gets blown apart.

Ebay addicts More than £4bn traded on eBay here this year, accounting for 1.3% of UK sales and an average of £3,000 per trader; latest news – the tax man’s interested in a slice!

Broadband Britain Finally broadband home access outweighs dial-up, but spare a thought for the poor folks still on dial up.

Navigators

"The future of advertising is the internet"Bill Gates 27/10/05

"It is happening now and is strong, rapid and large. [And there’s a] tremendous violence in traditional media as it continues to get displaced by digital."Sir Martin Sorrell, 27/10/05

"What is happening is a revolution in the way young people access news. Unless we awaken to these changes, which are quite different to those of 5 or 6 years ago, we will, as an industry, be relegated to the status of also-rans."Rupert Murdoch, American Society of Newspaper Editors, 13/04/05

Smallprint

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